


Daddy's Little Girl

by ReaperWriter



Category: Dead Like Me
Genre: Backstory, Domestic Violence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 18:47:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ReaperWriter/pseuds/ReaperWriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Slight AU:  Sometimes, we can't avoid the bad choices.  Sometimes, they are just part of who we are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Daddy's Little Girl

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



She was one of the Greenwich Adairs, she was fond of saying. Today, in Seattle, it sounded grand and impressive. In her day, it had been less so. Being a Greenwich Adair meant you were the daughter of a man who got lucky, who seduced the boss's daughter, married her on the sly, and quickly got her knocked up, so that the old man wouldn't kill him. It helped that the boss's only son had died of diphtheria at a young age. John "Jacky-Boy" Adair was one generation away from off the boat Irish, a stable hand with an eye for horseflesh and a silver tongue. Helen Ephgrave was the daughter of wealth and privilege, related distantly to the Rockefellers and the Astors. She fell hard, and fast, and truly well.

He split her lip the first time when she was three months pregnant, when she had caught him humping the help in a back staircase and she had cried. So she took refuge in her garden, and when she started having babies, she named them after her favorite plants. Daisy. Rose. Lily. Reed. And the unnamed ones, the ones she lost when Jack beat her so badly, she miscarried.

And into this world, Daisy grew up the oldest. And what she learned from her mother was that marrying for love was a pretty good way to get screwed over. She remembered the day she told her parents that she planned to go on and become an actress. Her father was already drunk, and slow to raise his hand. She saw it coming and so she slapped him, hard. He threw her out and told her she was dead to them, as her mother wept at the top of the stairs.

She learned quickly that Broadway and Hollywood were a lot less about how good of an actor she was, and all about how good she was with her other…assets. And she liked the attention, liked the gifts, the flowers, the clothes, that came with using those…assets. Though never once with anyone truly important. She had bit parts, small moments. Never the lead, never the star. And then Lily had died.

She hadn't been invited to the wedding, but she had remembered Tolliver Morris as a boy who used to pull the wings off birds on the summer estates up near the Hamptons. Now, she stood on the hill, watching the grieving widower as they lowered his "beloved" wife, whom he had thrown down the stairs for daring to deny him sex, into her grave. And even from way up in the back, through the black Brussels lace of her mother's veil, she could see the black eye.

She often wonders why Rube doesn't call her on her bullshit. He's the only one old enough to know, old enough to recognize that her grand and glorious tale of dying on the set of Gone with the Wind is a lie. They hadn't even read Vivien Leigh for Scarlett until seven days after she had ended up dead. True, the land where she died would later play a role in the film. But at the time, she was just tagging along on a location scout with a low level flunkey in David O. Selznick's company. A married, low level flunky, who had gotten them both drunk on cheap champagne and left a cigarette burning after they passed out following sloppy, unsatisfying sex.

And so she had died, and the bastard had lived, waking faster and getting out, leaving her to try to find her own way to safety. It showed that this man had never truly loved her, and she wondered why no one had ever really, truly loved her. She was buried in a pauper's grave, and no one but the grave diggers came to see her body off.

She had bounced around for years, from one posting to another, usually kicked to the curb by head reapers who got sick of her scams, tired of the need for attention, annoyed with the drama and the glamour and the tall tales she told. Everywhere she goes, the lies trip off her tongue. Tales of a life spent on the arm of the finest men in Hollywood, of her rising star status, of how her next break would have been the big one. Daisy Adair, ingénue superstar. It sounded so much better than Daisy Adair, Hollywood's harlot. Daisy Adair, untalented train wreck. Daisy Adair, everyone's good time girl.

And now, here she is, and Rube calls her on most of her crap. He pushes her to be better. He doesn't kick her to the curb at the first opportunity. And that feels…odd. Daisy supposes that this is what a family is supposed to be like, accepting you even when they knew you are so full of shit, your eyes should be brown. But she doesn't get why Rube cares. She doesn't understand what angle he's working, what his reward is for trying to make her a better person.

And then there is Mason. Fucked up, drunk, addicted, washed out Mason. She remembers being an extra in a production of Peter Pan once, a mermaid seen on stage for all of five seconds, with absolutely no lines and so much make-up, she was unrecognizable. And she finds herself now, every morning, sitting across the table from the boy who never really grew up, and he keeps looking at her like she's Wendy Darling, and it scares the shit out of her. Because her mother loved a good time drinker, and he beat her black and bloody.

And so when she meets Ray, it seems so easy. He's like the bad old days, the ones when she felt good, when her looks and her style and her willingness to spread her legs made her a wanted commodity. He assures her he will make her a star, that he will give her everything she's ever wanted, and its ground she knows, terrains she has mapped before. He's good at making her feel good, and saying what she needs to hear, and so she slips back into the old Daisy, the easy, breezy, good time who will do what she has to in order to get what she wants.

And because she wants it so badly, she's willing to overlook the little things. The times when he calls her stupid, when he makes some little remark to her about how she could be better, prettier, more special. How very luck she is to be with a man like him, who can stoop to giving her what she desires. And she ignores it when George recoils from him, when Mason calls her out for giving the time of day to a man who doesn't worship her, not like he does. Because George is just a malcontent and Mason is jealous. And so she goes on with it, even when Rube tells her to let it go, that it can't end well.

The first time he hits her, she's five minutes late for their date, because the first cab she got had a flat tire and she had to hail a second one, and he had been left standing outside the restaurant, looking like a fool in his own mind. So he slaps her, in an alley, and then takes her home, and he fucks her in a brutal way that has nothing to do with making love and everything to do with asserting power, control. Ray hates not being in control. And so she learns to be careful, to do things just how he likes them, to be exactly what he needs.

Rube sees the writing on the wall when she starts fucking up her reaps for fear of being late for something Ray wants her to be at or not getting done an errand Ray wants her to do. Even Roxy tries to talk to her, to tell her that this is crazy, that's she's Daisy fucking Adair, not some punching bag. But she doesn't have time, she has to be available for Ray if she's going to get her big break.

George and Mason try to stop her from moving in with him, but she just walks past them with her suitcases to Ray's expensive sports car. The sight of Mason, chasing them down the road, pisses Ray off enough that he knocks her to the ground that night in their bedroom and kicks her. Because she is what she is, the bruises always heal quickly, but not so quickly that people don't notice. Even for reapers, broken ribs take time.

It comes to a point where Rube is probably going to have to write her off, turn her over to upper management for a transfer or something, and it sucks, because Rube doesn't like failure. And then the list comes. R. Summers, 11:39 PM, at his home address.

She looks in the mirror that night, and sees the healing bruise and cut on her cheek, and suddenly she's seven years old again, and her mother is sitting at her dressing table, dabbing with a towel filled with ice at the gash Jacky-boy's ring has left, while Daisy and Lily sit on the floor and play with their dolls. She's seventeen and can't go to cotillion because her father struck her so hard, her eye is swollen shut. She's twenty one and her little sister is being lowered into the ground. She's twenty three years old and two years dead and watching as her mother is carried down the hill to join Lily, having taken a bottle of pills with her bottle of champagne.

Daisy closes her eyes and wonders when their tragedy became her own, when the cycle claimed her too. And she's had enough. So she takes a walk into a neighbor's house and finds the pills they have. And she puts them in his scotch and then leaves, telling him she's running out to get him more liquor, since he's almost out. She reaps him as she's leaving, but she doesn't give a shit if he finds the lights or not.

She ends up in the Waffle Haus, a cup of tea in her hands, when Rube finds her. He knows how it will look, and he knows what it's done to her and what it will do to Mason if she goes. And so Rube cleans up the mess. He and Mason take the body and Ray's fancy sports car, and they stage it to look like one too many drinks on one too many curvy roads. They fix it so the car goes up in flames from the crash, and the body with it. So that a young woman on her way home from visiting a friend's cabin calls in from her classic mustang and reports the calamity. So that a policewoman who happens to be in the area is first on the scene. And just like that, its curtains for old Ray Summers.

And Daisy gives the performance of a life time, the sad grieving lover bereft by her lose. Clothes of black, tear-reddened eyes, gnashing of teeth. Everyone loves a brave face, a loss overcome. And as the days turn to weeks, and Ray's name is barely a blip, a different Daisy comes to the table in the Waffle Haus in the mornings. Gone is the bravado. Gone are the tales of daring doing of movie stars. She's quieter, shyer, and grateful for the fact that the people around give a shit about her, despite it all. That they would risk everything to bail her out. That family isn't a birthright, most of the time, but rather finding your own tribe.

And so the world went on, and death continued to make its demands, and Daisy stopped being one of the Greenwich Adairs, and just became Daisy, plain and simple. Well, most of the time.


End file.
